I could've sworn firefox had an "all tabs" preview button that looked like 4 blocks in a grid, before the Australis era. Can't find any pictures/video footage of it in action however.
I just think it goes to show how little the window management of desktop OSes has improved over the years that desktop applications have had to up the ante...
I also think the differing behaviour between different apps implementing split panes (e.g. keyboard controls for creating/switching) is very annoying. Somtimes this flies in the face of any desktop's native window splitting or tab support as e.g. an app stops supporting multiple windows. For example, current browsers don't have a good way to configure usage without tabs, and at some point removed support for setting the window icon to the site's favicon.
Yeah. I'm surprised this along with the money thing are listed in the article at all. These are the sort of things you learn within the first month of writing assembly, and were widely used across the industry at the time (and times prior). The bit shifting optimization is performed by GCC even at -O0, and likely already was at the time, as it's one of the simpler optimizations to make. It's like calling "xor eax, eax" a masterful optimization tactic for clearing a register.
Looking at the macro-level optimizations like the rest of the article does is significantly more interesting.
I did a bunch of distro hopping in the 90's but locked onto Debian (mainly testing, now largely unstable) not long after. I'm still just not sure what compels people elsewhere. Especially now: the Debian installer was vicious if you were a newbie, but I hear it's pretty ok now.
This is largely a me problem! I don't understand what the value add is of other offerings. It's unclear what else would be good or why. Debian feels like it really has what's needed now. Things work. Hardware support is good. Especially in the systemd era, so much of what used to make distros unique is just no longer a factor; there's common means for most Linux 's operation. My gut tells me we are forking and flavoring for not much at all. Aside from learning some new commands, learning Arch has been such a recent non-event for me. It feels like we are having weird popularity contests over nothing. And that amplifies my sense of: why not just use Debian?
But I also have two and a half plus decades of Linux, and my inability to differentiate and assess from beginner's eyes is absolutely key to this all. I try to ask folks, but it's still all so unclear what real motivations, and more, what real differences there are.
The real differences are things that maintainers do. Like how... OBS I think? ...had a bunch of people come in with issues that only existed in the Debian version. Debian software has a bunch of patches, Arch software has far fewer and sticks closer to upstream, other distros will vary. Derivatives also made nonfree easier to set up, which was especially important when MP3 was still encumbered. Nowadays Debian still has the reputation of having old, outdated versions of software, which is going to be hard to shake, especially considering stability is meant to be their main draw.
It's worth noting that while these videos may have been unintentional, this was also an era when youtube was still inventing itself. Sure, there was real content creation, but the structures of sponsors and ad revenue that can be a real income today weren't there. Let's plays were just starting to dominate the platform, and people were still figuring out how to make money off of that.
As a result, there was a lot of this type of content: barely edited, poorly performed, honest moments of real life, amateurish creations of any kind, be that digital animation, music, acting, etc. I feel these IMG_xxxx videos reflect some of the vibe of the era. Now, sharing videos with people is easy enough in group chats, and youtube content feels so manufactured that people feel it's less appropriate to share this sort of thing via youtube.
One might say that early Youtube was mainly thought of as a video pastebin that allowed (JS-assisted) hotlink-embedding into other pages. Youtube was to video as image-hosting sites like Imgur were to images. Which was important, in both cases, because not just video but even (HQ) images were hard to host yourself at the time, and also hard to send to other people without hosting them somewhere.
With both video and image-sharing sites, you didn't really expect the site itself to function as a social network that was worth "browsing." Rather, you expected the "front page view" to be an upload view; and from there, to take your uploaded assets and embed them onto a page to put them into proper context. And it's these webpages-that-contextualize-image/video-assets that you'd share links to, on forums and on early social bookmarking platforms (Fark, StumbleUpon, etc.)
I love wondering if and how this kind of "Wild West frontier" in technology and communication and social interaction will ever come again:
Say we colonize Mars. Streaming anything from Earth takes hours (well 3-22 light minutes). Martians may invent their own planetary social network and share their own weird Martian memes for a while.
Or interstellar colony ships traveling for decades between the stars, and then practically cut off from Earth at whatever new exoplanet we land on.
There will definitely be lots of "golden eras of creativity" still to come, if we survive that long.
Mars' gravity is only 38% of Earth so I think quite a few would be crazy feats of strength or odd trajectories of objects. At least they would be if I were making them.
Any time someone carves out a new space online, the same sort of thing happens. Pioneers create infrastructure. Early adopters rush to explore the new medium. New possibilities or new constraints spur creativity. Then, usually one of two things happens: the new space was a brief fad, and it dies away; or the masses arrive and it undergoes an eternal September, standardization, commercialization, enshittification, drama… in other words, becomes integrated into the wider net. Those fed up leave and begin to carve out a new space…
Some initiatives (like the Gemini Protocol) remain (for now) in a tenuous niche where mass adoption seems impossible and yet they also don’t seem to be going away.
Yeah, the _reason_ this was in the iPhone is that YouTube was a normal and reasonable (if unusual - because sharing videos online was unusual) way to share videos with friends and family. And people cared way less about privacy back then.
How do you back up and restore things without root? I've found that even with root, these days many backups are useless thanks to using hardware-backed encryption...
There are various options, but if you use syncthing, it is as easy as creating a share on your PC or backup machine and on the phone. Everything gets synced automatically.
Well everything you chose to sync gets synced. Like photos, documents etc. You can also set up apps in such a way where they make automatic local backups on your phone in the folder that gets synced. There are multiple android apps for syncthing
It has a braindead cache checking, I've fixed it locally and I'm cleaning it up for the upstream submission. But otherwise, it's always faster for me than Buildkit.
Control over your data is part of anonymity. Sure, everyone will know the service belongs to you, but you'll be in total control over who knows what exactly. To most people not in the eye of the law, that is most of the anonymity they require.
Also, services like TOR exist. Both on the hosting and user side.
If you think TOR is anonymous then I have a bridge to sell you. It's far more likely a fed is going to record your activity on TOR than on a standard open web connection.
The point of TOR is that while it can be detected, at the entry nobody knows what you're sending to whom, and at the exit nobody knows who is sending what. The fed sniffing my TOR connection can't really do anything with it.
Best I could find is: https://www.askvg.com/how-to-enable-ie-like-quick-tabs-featu... But I'm not sure if this landed, or if it ended up functioning differently.
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